Lvwei Cultural Tourism: Four Key Priorities for Innovation and Enhancement of Rural Tourism

Lvwei Introduction: Rural tourism plays a significant role in driving rural society, increasing farmers' incomes, and modernizing agriculture. After nearly a decade of rapid development, it has also accumulated numerous practical problems. As a cultural tourism planning institution, Lvwei Cultural Tourism proposes that during the 14th Five-Year Plan period, rural tourism should focus on four key areas: environmental governance optimization and appropriate landscape expression, highlighting rural characteristics and promoting cultural and tourism integration, innovating industrial-financial models and enriching integrated formats, and cultivating innovative talents and improving management levels. This will guide rural tourism onto a healthy, orderly, and sustainable development track, better driving the rural economy.

Rural tourism significantly promotes rural society, farmers' income growth, and agricultural modernization. Under the strategic push for rural revitalization and the era's demand for cultural and tourism integration, market demand has shifted from sightseeing and leisure to a composite of vacation experiences. Rural tourism products are entering a new phase of creative and refined development. Lvwei Cultural Tourism believes that during the 14th Five-Year Plan period, rural tourism needs to break through current difficulties by exploring innovative development from multiple perspectives: planning guidance, multi-dimensional optimization of rural tourism formats, leveraging the uniqueness of cultural and tourism integration, strengthening brand building, and intensifying the cultivation of composite talents. This will effectively promote the high-quality transformation and development of rural tourism.

1. Current Challenges in Rural Tourism Development

In 2018, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, together with the National Development and Reform Commission and other departments, issued the "Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Sustainable Development of Rural Tourism," explicitly requiring all regions to include rural tourism development as an important part of economic and social development plans, territorial space plans, and special plans for infrastructure construction and ecological environment protection. These plans should fully reflect the development requirements of rural tourism and support eligible areas in conducting resource surveys and development status assessments to compile rural tourism development plans. Since 2019, the construction of national key rural tourism villages has been launched. In 2020, 300 national rural tourism boutique routes were introduced. By the end of 2021, three batches of national key rural tourism villages (totaling 1,199) and one batch of 100 national key rural tourism towns (townships) had been announced.

With the rapid development of rural tourism over the past decade, many practical problems have accumulated, such as rural environmental pollution, inadequate protection of rural culture, lack of distinctive resource utilization, serious product homogenization, insufficient cultural heritage and innovation, weak brand awareness, and lack of talent and funds. These challenges directly affect the sustainable and healthy development of rural tourism.

2. Four Key Priorities for Innovation and Enhancement of Rural Tourism

Under the development goals of the 14th Five-Year Plan (by 2025, annual rural leisure tourism visitors exceed 4 billion, operating revenue exceeds 1.2 trillion yuan, and returnees and newcomers to rural entrepreneurship and innovation exceed 15 million), Lvwei Cultural Tourism, as a cultural tourism planning institution, proposes focusing on four key areas: environmental governance optimization and appropriate landscape expression, highlighting rural characteristics and promoting cultural and tourism integration, innovating industrial-financial models and enriching integrated formats, and cultivating innovative talents and improving management levels. This will guide rural tourism onto a healthy, orderly, and sustainable development track, better driving the rural economy.

(1) Environmental Governance Optimization and Appropriate Landscape Expression

"Lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets" has become a consensus. During China's 13th Five-Year Plan period, rural tourism helped lift more than 20,000 poor villages out of poverty, with local villagers as the main beneficiaries. However, it also accumulated a series of problems that overdraw the rural environment, such as illegal construction, unauthorized building, indiscriminate garbage dumping, and sewage discharge. In an era where the country continuously calls for ecological civilization, rural tourism must keep pace and strive to forge a new path of win-win economic development and ecological protection. Lvwei Cultural Tourism believes that improvement should be achieved through three approaches: ecological environment restoration, infrastructure upgrading, and appropriate landscape expression.

Restore the ecological environment. Good natural ecological environment is the foundation for attracting tourists. We must always adhere to environmental priorities, do a good job of environmental restoration and remediation, farmland and wildlife protection, regularly organize farmers to clean up the environmental sanitation in and outside their courtyards, maintain village cleanliness, provide tourists with a good and complete ecological environment, and showcase the beauty of the original ecology.

Reduce pollution through infrastructure improvement. Increase infrastructure upgrading, focusing on promoting livable infrastructure such as rural garbage cleanup, clean energy, and sewage treatment. Push the toilet revolution to a new level, strengthen the deployment of mobile toilets, improve the quality of farmers' living environment, and strive to create a tourism environment with "smooth roads, clear water, and bright lights."

Achieve appropriate landscape design expression. From a tourism perspective, landscape includes objective scenery and subjective landscape perception. Rural tourism development must pay special attention to the expression of rural landscape perception, distinguishing it from urban landscape experiences. Lvwei Cultural Tourism believes that this should be realized through tourism planning and development techniques, rooted in the local area, grasping the local context and cultural context, creating "rural imagery," and providing tourists with diverse and rich aesthetic experiences from multiple angles.

In addition, rural tourism destinations should also pay attention to the promotion of environmental protection among tourists, avoiding behaviors such as littering and climbing damage, forming a green development concept under "host-guest integration," so that rural tourism truly achieves environmental beauty.

(2) Highlighting Rural Characteristics and Promoting Cultural and Tourism Integration

Local culture is the soul of rural tourism development, and rural tourism can also become an important way to activate and recreate local culture. Especially in the context of cultural and tourism integration, the innovative development of rural tourism should pay more attention to cultivating new forms of cultural and tourism integration, further strengthening cultural transformation, so that the original local culture can be inherited, innovated, and developed, enhancing the self-sustaining function of rural tourism and boosting the sustainable economic development of rural tourism.

Innovate the experiential display of local culture. In addition to intuitive displays such as village buildings, rural scenery, folk activities, and festival performances, local culture should also be combined with the needs of the times, fully considering the preferences of tourists of different ages and types. Through technology-integrated experiences such as intangible cultural heritage exhibitions and immersive farming scenes, build a multi-dimensional and diverse cultural tourism product system, attract tourists' attention, and stimulate new consumption vitality.

Promote the appropriate utilization of agricultural, rural, and farmer cultural heritage. In recent years, the Party Central Committee and the State Council have attached great importance to the protection, inheritance, and development of cultural heritage. Many policy documents have emphasized strengthening the protection, utilization, and development of cultural heritage funds. In recent years, the No. 1 central document has also proposed to effectively protect outstanding agricultural cultural heritage. Agricultural culture and rural tourism have a high degree of spatial and subject coupling. We can focus on strengthening the rational development and utilization of characteristic cultural resources such as agricultural culture and intangible cultural heritage, forming a number of characteristic rural cultural industry villages.

Identify regional characteristics and form a distinctive IP. Lvwei Cultural Tourism believes that brand building is particularly important for rural tourism to achieve high-quality sustainable development. First, fully refine local regional characteristics, find the right development positioning, and ensure uniqueness as much as possible. For example, the sun-drying culture of Huangling Village in Wuyuan County, Jiangxi Province, and the Guandong culture of Yuanjia Village in Liquan County, Shaanxi Province, have become influential national rural tourism super IP villages. Second, around the brand IP, develop representative and culturally significant specialty products, paying attention to experience and interactivity to ensure that tourists can participate and experience the spiritual insights brought by the brand.

Give full play to the unique role of cultural and tourism integration in rural tourism development, actively promote the construction of cultural industries and the integrated development model of tourism in rural areas, promote the transformation of rural tourism from "environmental beauty" to "connotative beauty," and embark on a cultural and composite rural tourism industry development path.

(3) Innovating Industrial-Financial Models and Enriching Integrated Formats

The "National Rural Industry Development Plan (2020-2025)" proposes to develop multiple types of integrated formats, drive format integration through function expansion, and promote the integration of agriculture with culture, tourism, education, health care, and other industries. Lvwei Cultural Tourism believes that through industrial integration, the role of "tourism +" should be fully utilized to integrate the three industries, enrich and innovate formats, and upgrade rural tourism.

Under the current situation of widespread homogenization in domestic rural tourism, new formats and products are constantly emerging. In the era of mass rural tourism and vacation, Lvwei Cultural Tourism once proposed the "five flavors complete" rule for upgrading rural tourism formats, that is, breaking through the traditional "see + eat + stay" format pattern, complying with the five standard requirements of rural flavor, wild flavor, folk flavor, human flavor, and new flavor, to upgrade rural tourism formats.

- Rural flavor: Eliminate urbanization, preserve rural charm in landscape creation and environmental optimization, reflect nostalgic memory and local flavor, and showcase the most original, most leisurely, and most green rural charm.

- Wild flavor: Have a rural pastoral atmosphere, whether it is mountain wild forests or fertile fields, reflecting the natural countryside.

- Folk flavor: Inherit and interpret the original rural folk customs through tourism techniques, allowing tourists to perceive authentic local customs.

- Human flavor: Transform farmers' production into lifestyle, and life into products, people-oriented, constructing rural production and lifestyle.

- New flavor: Use innovative methods to package resources and products, allowing tourists to experience and perceive from the perspective of participation and interaction, forming a "new atmosphere" and "new scenery" in the countryside.

Promote a 6+N three-dimensional format system. Upgrade from the traditional six elements of tourism to a 6+N three-dimensional format system to achieve a diversified format system. Lvwei Cultural Tourism believes that this should be achieved through integration with industries: integration with agricultural scenes to actively build scenic spots that integrate leisure, tourism, agriculture, and creative agriculture, developing formats such as ecological education, farming experience, cultural exploration, and leisure sports; integration with agricultural by-product processing and handicraft processing to build creative industrial parks and characteristic experience parks to enhance experience; integration with study tours, health care and other industries to develop new formats such as extracurricular expansion, rural health preservation, and rural residence health care, improving the elements of rural tourism industry, accelerating innovation of agriculture-tourism + N industry integration, and building support for rural industrialization development under the guidance of multi-dimensional formats.

Technological innovation leads to format quality improvement. Grasp the background of new technologies and social media. Technological changes such as 5G, big data, cloud computing, IoT, and VR are coming, making the integration of rural areas and technology a realistic possibility. Combined with the demand trend of personalized and participatory experiences in the mass market, it is necessary to reshape the consumption scenarios of rural tourism formats, creatively design their recreation methods, and gradually achieve quality leap and smart development.

(4) Cultivating Innovative Talents and Improving Management Levels

Lvwei Cultural Tourism once divided modern farmers into five categories: original residents with household registration and land; second-generation farmers who have household registration but returned to the countryside after moving to cities; new professional farmers brought by agricultural industry upgrading; "sentimental villagers" who return to the countryside for entrepreneurship and innovation; and "returning villagers" who come for health preservation and elderly care. The modernization of rural areas and the innovative development of rural tourism both require the assistance of composite talents.

Fully value the influence of new rural elites. In the exploration of innovative development of rural tourism, it is necessary to fully recognize the practical needs of new rural elites such as retired public officials, experts and scholars, and returning migrant workers, and encourage and attract them to participate in co-construction. This can gradually improve the current situation of rural society and ecological civilization.

Pay special attention to returnees and newcomers for rural entrepreneurship and innovation. In 2019, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, together with the National Development and Reform Commission, carried out a pilot "Creative Go to the Countryside" work in key villages. Local governments should also guide and integrate social forces such as design companies, higher education institutions, industry associations, and new media platforms to tap into and refine the characteristic resources of rural handicrafts, residential houses, and catering. Through training, study and interaction, and other methods, they should locally expand the new rural talent team that understands tourism and is good at business management, thereby promoting the innovative development and professional management of rural tourism.